Week 3: Frank (2-0) vs. Ink (2-0) \\ Frank wins 6-4

[sacrifice]

frank: I was looking forward to diving into one of your pieces. Perhaps unfortunately it's this particular effort, and even though I think it's dope on many levels, there are a few issues I have. First of all, you use the word eligible, and maybe you mean legible? Not sure, but it does change the meaning of the line significantly. I'm also struggling with the sentence structure... in the first couple lines, reads like the newspaper has the quizzical demeanor; obviously you mean the mythical creature, but still, the period there upsets the narrative flow for me a bit. The first few lines have some of the most stretched and forced sounding rhymes I've seen in a while - now, don't take it harshly, because as good writers do, you have a way of making awkward language passable because of your formal/mechanical polished writing style. I loved the image of the grass turning greener as the creature approaches. So far, it looks like you're using the grass as a connective-device; the thing that brings the reader back to a coherent thought; because the verse truly reads like a character is passing through various dream-scenarios. The funny thing is, it's so easy to create an interpretation here that maybe you were going for. It's convenient for me to say something like, this piece is a tapestry of random "scenarios," probably made manifest through any number of altered psychological states and/or dreaming. What I love about this interpretation, is it allows your random-seeming firings to coexist next to one another, while also maintaining a kind of existence-in-a-vacuum, serving as isolated thoughts and images. Rhyming has a way of dictating meaning in cases like this, and the reader, if he/she so chooses, can enjoy the rhyming, and perhaps allow themselves their subjective interpretation. I'll stop before I get ahead of myself, but I really did enjoy this piece a lot, despite the shit up there^ that seems more negative than it is. I like to be critical of the better writers, because I would prefer the best writers tear my stuff apart in the same way. But yeah... dope shit. I've really liked everything you've presented thus far. (I plan on dropping some feedback on your verse that demolished me week 1. I think my verse was excellent, but you did a great job).

Ink: This was pretty cool. For the most part, I appreciated how you made the narrative progress using very chaotic descriptions, while not focusing so heavily on whether or not a robot was actually attacking... I'm glad you didn't spend any time on the robot itself, or whatever it is that is causing the disaster, but rather, the disaster is revealed through the various transitions by the narrator from experience to reflection; the ending was OK, but I can't see clearly what you're trying to imply. Returning to the child in death is a common enough trope, but it works because of the way the piece cascades toward destruction. "Reverberate through my head and carve caves in my dreams" was by far the sickest line in the piece. And in a lot of ways, that line describes the piece - these forceful events shaping the reality of a person experiencing first-hand first-order chaos. It speeds up and slows down in a lot of places, and really effectively in some places... like the italics toward the end, you really get an image of the camera, zooming down on the three, one motionless, the others scrambling in desperation, and thus the realization, both by the narrator and the people interested in maybe rescuing the narrator. Cool juxtaposition and assimilation effect conceptually. This is a difficult match to vote on, because there's frank, who is an excellent rhymer with a really polished writing style. This week's verse was really a show case of his imagination and his rhyme-intuition .. it's easy to see that he probably wrote it in a flurry. Ink on the other hand, isn't focused so much on complex rhyme schemes, and focuses more heavily on the way certain descriptive techniques drive the pace of the piece.

Vote: frank in a close battle.